MFCAMNet: predicting miRNA-disease associations by multi-feature cascade attention mechanism network

Y Wang, Chen Yang, Yucheng Zhang

Abstract Drive by the rapid envolution of deep-learning techniques, a large body of biological experiments bas has uncovered extensive associations between microRNAs (miRNAs) and complex human diseases, hig- hlighting the pivotal roles of miRNAs in pathogenesis. Elucidating these associations is essential for understanding disease mechanisms and developing preventive strategies. Traditional wet-lab validati- on, however, is notoriously labor- and resource-intensive, creating an urgent demand for efficient computational tools that can prioritize the most promising miRNA–disease candidates. Existing predictors predominantly rely on a single category of handcrafted features, thereby overlooking the complementary information embedded in multiple, heterogeneous data sources. Although a few recent attempts integrate diverse features, they usually exploit only a limited subset and fail to capture the intricate, non-linear relationships among them. To address these limitations, we propose MFCAMNet, a Multi-Feature fusion and Cross-Self-Attention model for MiRNA–Disease association prediction. Firstly, we construct multiple similarity matrices and employ two independent autoencoders with multi-source feature attention to obtain deep features of miRNA and disease to extract the inherent relationships between multiple features. Secondly, the proposed model employs element-level addition, element-level multiplication, and concatenation operations to generate miRNA-disease pair features with rich information. Finally, we use the encoder structure of the transformer to fuse the three deep features and predict all potential miRNA disease associations. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on the public HMDD v2.0 and HMDD v3.2 benchmark datasets. MFCAMNet achieved average AUCs of 0.9455 and 0.9420 under 5-fold and 10-fold cross-validation on HMDD v2.0, respectively, and an AUC of 0.9578 under 5-fold cross-validation on HMDD v3.2, outperforming state-of-the-art competitors. Case studies on breast, esophageal, and lung cancers further corroborate the reliability and practical utility of the proposed method.